Buck Riley: DID YOU KNOW
Buck Riley: that before the Industrial Revolution, double negatives were proper English?
Trigger: No they weren't not!
Buck Riley: yup :3
Buck Riley: it was an issue of agreement.
Buck Riley: just like subjects and verbs should agree, whether the sentence is positive or negative would also need to agree.
Buck Riley: just like with Either/or, Niether/nor
Buck Riley: but after the industrial revolution, when science and math were badass, people decided that if two negatives make a positive, then double negatives negate themselves!@
Buck Riley: I should say, people with influence ":3
Trigger: Those people of influence were right in saying so.
Buck Riley: hahaha :P
Buck Riley: do you know why you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition?
Trigger: why?
Trigger: I should say rather, "Why not?" haha!
Buck Riley: when English was first becoming standardized, the done thing was to speak Latin. Latin was a better language; English was vulgar and common. In an attempt to devulgarize the language, people of grammatical influence carried over rules from Latin. In Latin, there's no way to end a sentence with a preposition because they change parts of speech by changing the word from within. Prepositions in Latin HAVE to have an object. The same is true for split infinitives. In Latin, it's not possible because the infinitive is part of the word, so it was decidedly vulgar to do so in English.
Buck Riley: no one usually says, "With whom did you go to the party?" because it's not natural; English didn't develop that way in spoken word, only in written form. And that's because the only people who could read and write at the time the rule was made were those who could afford education. So, written English developed among the powerful, while spoken language developed with the masses.
Buck Riley: in short, most of those weird grammar rules you learn are simply arbitrary. and I find that fascinating.
Buck Riley: interestingly enough, I've also demonstrated that about which I have to lecture, both in an example, and in actually committing the crime the example commits.
Trigger: Fascinating.
Buck Riley: the example shows how the discourse of prescriptive grammar creates a system of power by which one can exclude others and tell them they're wrong. At the same time, I'm exerting power by using language to do the same thing.
Buck Riley: I am "in the know," which "makes me better."
Buck Riley: this is confusing. how in fuck am I supposed to lecture about this? >.>
Buck Riley: more fudge? :D
Buck Riley: -gives you moar-
Trigger: *nibbles* You're gonna make me fat.